Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 172 页

The process, therefore, that creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process that separates the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process that operates two transformations, whereby the social means of life and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called originary accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of separating the producer from the means of production. It appears as “originary” [Er erscheint als „ursprünglich“] because it constitutes the pre-history [Vorgeschichte] of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital.¹¹⁷

Marx’s concept of originary accumulation brings to centre stage, as some commentators have convincingly argued¹¹⁸, a – if not the – essential logic underlying the accumulation of capital: the logic ofseparation [Scheidung]. This separation (between the producer and the conditions of production, thus between the wage-labourer and the capitalist) constitutes, as Marx puts it across his work, ‘the actual formation-process of capital [den eigentlichen Bildungsprozeß des Kapitals]’¹¹⁹ and ‘the concept of capital.’¹²⁰

The conventional – although increasingly less so – reading of originary accumulation understands this concept within the terms of historical periodisation, which is to say that this accumulation is read as a chronologically distinct span of historical time that, centuries ago, gave rise to capitalism. Quite similar to the conception of formal subsumption as historically ‘preceding’ real subsumption, originary accumulation is, on this reading, not just a category of historical periodisation but a category of historical transition: it encompasses (15^th – 18^th century England being the archetype) the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism, and therefore more or less ‘ends’ after capitalism established itself on the world stage.¹²¹ This reading consequently highlights the empirical histories that Marx provides in the final chapters of the first volume of Capital: particularly the expropriation of the agricultural peasantry from the land they cultivated and collectively owned (and the acts of Parliament which sanctioned this expropriation), the manifold development of the state and the mechanisms through which it wields power¹²², and, outside the confines of the European nation-state, the global reach of colonial accumulation and imperialist war.¹²³ As De Angelis shows, Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) arguably inaugurates this reading as the predominant reading of originary accumulation, which is subsequently appropriated in different manners by Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913) and the infamous ‘Dobb-Sweezy debates’ on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.¹²⁴ These readings are not at all surprising, nor are they necessarily without merit, insofar as they are faithful to Marx’s position that originary accumulation ‘precedes capitalist accumulation’, that it ‘is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.’¹²⁵

¹¹⁶ Marx, Kapital 1, 742 (Capital 1, 874).

¹¹⁷ Marx, Kapital 1, 742 (Capital 1, 874-75). ‘This historical act is the historical genesis of capital, the historical process of separation which transforms the conditions of labour into capital and labour into wage-labour. This provides the basis for capitalist production.’ Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 3, 315.

¹¹⁸ See, in particular, Massimo De Angelis, ‘Marx and primitive accumulation: The continuous character of capital’s “enclosures”’, The Commoner, Volume 2 (September 2001),

http://www.commoner.org.uk/02deangelis.pdf (accessed 21 May 2015), and Werner Bonefeld, ‘The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution’, The

Commoner, Volume 2 (September 2001), http://www.commoner.org.uk/02bonefeld.pdf (accessed 21 May 2015).

¹¹⁹ Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, Dritter Teil, 414 (Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 3, 422). ¹²⁰ Marx, Capital 3, 354. See also Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 3, 311.

¹²¹ This is, at least at the level of the ‘diachronic analysis’, the framework of Balibar’s ‘Elements for a Theory of Transition’.

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